Comfort in a Whirlwind: Literature and Distress in General Practice

Abstract

Arguing that the general practitioner’s essential obligation to patients is the recognition of suffering and the offering of hope, this chapter considers how GPs who are daily faced with the pressure of patient distress in their consulting rooms might gain from engagement with literature. Three writers who have mattered personally to the author, and who are themselves at the boundary of philosophy and literature and the spiritual and the sick—Robert Burton, Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Paul Sartre—provide rich insights for the modern understanding and management of depression and the interaction of suffering and hope.